Response time speedup of multi-tier internet systems

Abstract

The immense growth of digital data has launched a series of profound changes in today's world. In order to handle the huge volume of data, the underlying systems are steadily subjected to optimizations. Often these systems in turn are composed of as complex multi-tier systems, whereas each is tasked with a specific function on the incoming dataset. However, the increasing complexity of these multi-tier internet systems requires appropriate techniques to estimate the benefit and the impact of costly improvement endeavors. This paper provides a mathematical basis to investigate the effects of individual tier improvements to the overall speedup of multi-tier internet based systems. The fundamental approach in this paper is to analyze the behavior of the well-known Mean-Value-Algorithm (MVA), which is an established prediction tool for computer applications. Based on the MVA algorithm, we deduce estimation formulas, which can be used to predict the overall speedup factor and the expected load at individual tiers. To evaluate our approach, we conduct a case study on a real world persistent identifier system.